Do people want to buy stuff inside Snapchat? Looks like Snapchat wants to find out.

Do people want to buy things directly through Snapchat? The company is trying to find out.

The company launched a new in-app Snap Store on Thursday, a section where users can buy sweatshirts with Snapchat’s logo, or a stuffed plush toy depicting Snapchat’s now famous dancing hotdog character. You can get to the store by scanning a special QR code on Snapchat’s website, and the company will sometimes feature the new store inside the Discover section of the app where it has professional content, like shows, from publishing partners.

Snapchat has sold branded merchandise before, but only on Amazon, not inside its own app. It even sells its video-recording sunglasses, called Spectacles, from an online store, but not inside Snapchat.

Snapchat

Which makes Snap’s decision to open this new store an interesting one. Snapchat is not going to make meaningful money selling sweatshirts — but that’s not the point. Instead, it looks as though Snapchat is trying to get some insight into how its user base might discover and buy products inside the app. Do people want to buy items from inside Discover? Do users navigate to the store using the special QR code that opens it inside the app?

Maybe Snap doesn’t care about that stuff — and selling sweatshirts is a fun way to turn some of its users into walking billboards for the product. Or maybe Snap has broader commerce ambitions, and selling its own gear from inside the app will give it a way to figure out what works — and what doesn’t — before signing up a bunch of partners.

Snap’s been thinking for years about selling items inside Discover. But that hasn’t happened. When the company first rolled out Snapcash, a peer-to-peer payments feature, it looked like commerce was going to follow. That never happened, either.

In any case, the store is now available inside the app, and Snapchat says it’ll drop new products next week. For now, the company will only ship to U.S. addresses.

Following comments from CEO Tim Cook on Wednesday, Apple on Thursday confirmed it will not hold a public auction to decide the site of a new U.S. campus that will be built in part using money repatriated from the company’s overseas cash hoard.AppleInsider – Frontpage News

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issued an update today on his office’s investigation into fake FCC net neutrality comments. More than 5,000 people have filed reports with the office over fake comments, the group says, and up to 2 million comments misused Americans’ identities. More than 100,000 came from New York, Florida, Texas, and California separately. As we reported last month, and as Schniederman confirmed again today, the FCC has refused to help with the investigation.

Schneiderman said in a public statement: “As we’ve told the FCC: moving forward with this vote would make a mockery of our public comment process and reward those who perpetrated this fraud to advance their own hidden agenda. The FCC must postpone this…

A couple of months back, Google introduced a brand new mobile payments app exclusive to India. The country’s banking landscape is a little different to many of the territories that currently have access to Android Pay, and so it needed a different approach. Until now, Tez has only been able to pay participating merchants or transfer between users, but it will soon be possible to pay utility bills, too.

According to Google, Tez has handled 140 million transactions in its first ten weeks and has more than 525,000 businesses signed on to accept payments.